BIONIC MAN

Back in the ’90s, everybody told Bioware that the western RPG was dead. “That’s the best news you can hear,” cofounder Trent Oster laughs. “That means that there is absolutely nobody looking at your market space, and you can roll in and do fun things.”

It also meant, however, that the studio was short on good examples to follow. Bioware’s model for a great D&D game, , had come out in the, the pioneering real-time strategy game. That’s why, when you click on a party member, you often hear a funny, fourth-wall breaking quip in the style of early Blizzard—a “Yes, oh omnipresent authority figure?” or “Stop touching me!”